ASBURY PARK, N.J. — Like a broken carousel, this boardwalk-lined beach resort has often seemed to be stuck in place.

Sweeping plans to revive its waterfront have been floated since the 1980s, when most of the city’s rides and games closed. But those proposals have produced few lasting or notable results.

The Asbury, a major new hotel, however, has some residents saying they’re more optimistic about a turnaround than they’ve been in years. The hotel, set to be completed in May, comes after a string of other redevelopment projects.

“It’s a new day,” said Yvonne Clayton, a city councilwoman who grew up in Asbury Park, relocated to Manhattan in 1968 and moved back in 2011. “We still have a ways to go, but we are nowhere near where we used to be.”

Created by iStar, a lender-turned-developer that has become a force in the city’s revival, the 110-room hotel occupies a complex once owned by the Salvation Army and used to house the organization’s retirees. It had been empty since the mid-2000s.

The $50 million project, which began in 2014, will retain much of the existing red brick structure on Fifth Avenue, a block and a half from the beach. The design team, led by Anda Andrei, a designer who previously worked for the hotelier Ian Schrager, has removed floors, added doors and enlarged windows for an airier feel.

It’s the first new hotel to open in the city in perhaps as much as a half-century.

A resort city founded in 1871 that is about an hour from New York in light traffic, Asbury Park used to be packed with hotels. Despite its early popularity, Asbury Park began a long, slow decline after World War II, according to Werner Baumgartner, the city historian.

The city is best known as Bruce Springsteen’s launching pad, but through the years it has attracted acts as diverse as Ella Fitzgerald, the Rolling Stones and Van Halen. The Asbury’s developers hope to keep the musical traditions alive, offering a lofty event space where performances can be staged in front of about 300 people.

At the Asbury, special attention has been given to areas that can be shared by hotel guests and the public, in a community that development officials say takes its come-one-come-all vibe seriously. Asbury Park’s population of 17,000 is economically and racially mixed, and includes a growing gay population.

A long lobby with 22-foot ceilings will feature a music library, where anybody can select a vinyl record and play it on a turntable. Vintage cassettes and VHS tapes will also be on hand.

Outside the hotel, in a tree-shaded yard, trucks will dispense New Jersey-brewed beers to guests and passers-by, though an adjacent 50-foot hedge-encircled swimming pool will be mostly reserved for guests.

The complex’s roofs are intended to be festive gathering spots as well, including a section that will be lined with artificial grass, painted with a Twister board, and white picket fences. A towering movie screen will cover a wall.

A separate section will offer Salvation, a pergola-topped lounge named in honor of the building’s roots, where guests can sip cocktails while admiring striking Atlantic views.

Photo

Crowds on the Asbury Park boardwalk in 1970.Credit
Associated Press

“It’s all about having flowing, communal spaces,” said David Bowd, the chief executive of Salt Hotels, the Asbury’s operator. Currently, Salt operates two properties in Provincetown, Mass., and one on Shelter Island, N.Y.

The spare and industrial aesthetic of the Asbury may come as a surprise to anybody expecting a Royalton, the Midtown property whose stylish reinvention three decades ago by Mr. Schrager and Ms. Andrei, among others, largely defined the boutique hotel.

Also, unlike with other boutique properties, there will not be an on-site restaurant. The developers do not want to compete with the city’s thriving food scene, Mr. Bowd said. Instead, the front desk will sell breakfast sandwiches, salads and bottled water to guests who are expected to spend much of their time on the go.

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Upstairs, room sizes have not changed much since the Salvation Army days, though developers have upgraded them with blond wood, en-suite bathrooms and historical black-and-white photos of beach and concert scenes.

They have also been tailored to a range of guests, from large families to single travelers. Ten of the 110 rooms will contain four bunk beds and lockable closets, so that solo vacationers on tight budgets can stay hostel-style. Rates will start at $50 a night, for one of those bunks, or $125 a night for a room with a queen-size bed, according to a project spokeswoman.

Earlier efforts to redevelop the area often failed. Economic downturns, corruption convictions, and lawsuits between the city and developers seemed to hobble large-scale plans, which often razed buildings but put nothing up in their place.

One hard-to-miss symbol of those failures may be the block at Ocean and Third Avenues, near the Asbury hotel. A condo planned there in the 1980s, Ocean Mile, was never completed, leaving a skeletal frame. In the 2000s, that frame was cleared to make way for Esperanza, a different condo. Yet it failed, too, and a half-built structure still haunts the area.

Along the same lines, Asbury Partners, a developer picked to transform dozens of acres near the waterfront, also failed to complete much of what it promised. After the recession hit, iStar, a major lender to Asbury Partners, ultimately took over its properties.

Today, iStar, a publicly traded company with numerous condo projects in its national portfolio, controls 35 acres in Asbury Park. It has pledged to build thousands of homes, hundreds of hotel rooms, night life venues and storefronts, helped by generous property tax breaks, while reviving that desolate Esperanza site with a 16-story condo-hotel.

So far, iStar has completed Vive, a 28-unit condo complex that opened in 2014, and other condo projects are underway. It has also improved infrastructure, adding sidewalks, landscaping and lighting.

“Asbury Park has all these wonderful elements, the things that we look for in any great city or town,” said Jay Sugarman, the company’s chief executive, who recalled visiting Asbury Park in the early 1980s, during a road trip when he was at Princeton, and playing old mechanical games for a nickel.

“Our vision here is to create a magnet for interesting people who enjoy life,” Mr. Sugarman said. He expressed hope that in its revamped version, Asbury Park could compete as a vacation draw with Fire Island, the Hudson Valley or the Hamptons.

Whether a hotel can make the next Montauk remains to be seen. But in the meantime, the area is clearly enjoying a bounce.

In the summer, for the last several years, the mile-long beach has been packed, and a restored boardwalk is dotted with restaurants serving Korean tacos, Cuban sandwiches and ceviche. Inland, too, there are signs of investment, with old bank and newspaper buildings recast as housing.

Still, crime remains a problem, according to city officials, and the poverty rate is high.

But the Asbury hotel seems intent on addressing at least some of those social issues. It has established a 10-week hospitality training program for local residents, who after completing the course could land some of the 150 jobs being created by the new hotel, according to Mr. Bowd, who added, “At least, that’s our hope.”

A version of this article appears in print on February 10, 2016, on Page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: New Hotel Finds a Welcome in Asbury Park . Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe